thousand and three, but by that time the business was secure. He’d always majored on design and manufacture while I did everything else. The product range was established when he passed away, so it wasn’t difficult for me to carry on.’
‘When did you sell to Mr Higgins?’
‘Two thousand and six. I recruited Justin Orchard after James died, to replace him, and by that time he was well established in the job. He had an idea for a new product range, free-standing modular glass garden buildings. I liked it, but it would have taken a lot of working capital to get it going, plus it would have been a gamble at a time when the economic storm clouds were just starting to show over the horizon. Around that time I met Eden Higgins at a Scottish CBI gathering. Do you know him?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Haddock chuckled. ‘We’re just humble plods.’
‘So was his sister, I believe,’ she countered. ‘That’s why I asked. Anyway, we got talking. He had just started to diversify at the time, but he still thought like a furniture guy. Anything you could furnish, he was interested in it. A couple of weeks later he came to me and made me an offer for a controlling interest in the company, with an injection of new working capital. It was a great deal; I still have a one-third stake in a business that’s gone from strength to strength under his management. I don’t have any stake in Higgins Holdings, nobody else does, but I still draw salary, and dividend, from here.’
‘His management,’ Pye repeated. ‘Is his style always as rough as it was with Mackail?’
‘No,’ Joan Stewart replied, firmly. ‘That was unusual; it wasn’t like Eden at all. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell me in person; maybe he found it difficult, maybe he felt guilty.’
‘Hold on,’ Haddock intervened. ‘Are you saying it wasn’t Eden Higgins who told you to hold back payment from Mackail?’
‘No, I’m not. Look,’ she exclaimed, ‘what he was telling me to do wasn’t something you put on paper, or in an email, or even in a phone call. The message came from him, word of mouth, via his vicar on earth.’
‘Who?’ both detectives asked, simultaneously, in a duet.
‘Sorry,’ she laughed. ‘That’s what we call his right-hand man, Walter Hurrell. He gave me the instruction.’
Fifty-Eight
The morning after I’d made my promise to Amanda Dennis, I awoke from a confused dream. It was set at the beginning of the Godfather movie; I was the undertaker Bonasera and a grotesque male version of Amanda took the role of Don Corleone.
I’d given my friend a commitment that I hoped I wouldn’t come to regret. When it became clear that I was heading for the exit door of the police service she had offered me, tentatively, a permanent role with the Security Service. I’d have been in charge of the Scottish outstation, installed as Clyde Houseman’s boss. I turned her down, firmly, citing two reasons, the first being that in his shoes, I’d have resented me, the second, and by far the more significant, being that most of the work would have bored me rigid and that any that didn’t might have involved an element of risk, the kind that I’d promised Sarah I’d avoid in my middle years.
She’d used the help that she was giving me with Gates to back me into a corner. I’d have done the same, but I’d been deadly serious in the proviso I’d attached to my acceptance.
Having put the daft dream out of my mind and having seen Sarah off to work, I had nothing to do. I had given my ‘advice’ to the four detectives; whether they took it or not, that it was up to them. With that time on my hands, I decided to devote the morning to administration.
Not that there was much of it to do. Along with her report, Carrie McDaniels had given me a detailed invoice; her terms specified ‘Payment within seven days’, but with the fate of the man Mackail and his company fresh in my mind, I decided to do better than that. I put the details of her bill into my purchase ledger, then set up a payment through my business bank account.
I had thought about playing a few holes of golf with anyone who might have been hanging around the club, but a note on the bank’s website told me that it would take an hour before I could complete my cash transfer. That,